James Turrell Skyspace at Pomona College
Pomona College alumnus James Turrell (Season 1) has produced a Skyspace for his alma mater in the Draper Courtyard of the campus, realized in collaboration with consulting architects Marmol Radziner + Associates AIA. It is the first Skyspace regularly accessible to the public in Southern California.
Skyspace takes the form of an architectural optical illusion that heightens the viewer’s perception of light and space, whereby a seemingly paper-thin ceiling opens a rectangular frame “into” the sky above. For Pomona, Turrell has created an artificial transitioning keyed to sunrise and sunset using a floating metal canopy with sensors programmed to change in intensity and hue on the underside. Directly beneath, a shallow pool echoes the changing light and time.
Turrell studied mathematics and perceptual psychology at Pomona in the early 1980s. Appropriately, the new Skyspace is situated among the buildings housing the academic disciplines related to the science of mind –psychology, neuroscience and cognitive science– as well as the earth sciences of geology and environmental analysis.
In addition to the new Skyspace, the Pomona College Museum of Art is presenting James Turrell at Pomona College, an exhibition uniting the various threads of Turrell’s artistic practice. The exhibition continues through May 17, 2008. For further information, please visit www.pomona.edu/museum.
Chuck Close show at Tacoma Art Museum features Art21 artists
Those in the Seattle area will want to check out A Couple of Ways of Doing Something, a show of photographs by Chuck Close and typeset poetry by Bob Holman, and featuring portraits of Art21 artists Laurie Anderson, James Turrell (both Season 1), and Kiki Smith (Season 3). The show, which opened March 1 at the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington, explores Close’s use of the daguerreotype as a starting point to create other works. Close often draws on his friends, many of them artists themselves, as subjects for his photographs and paintings. In addition to Anderson, Turrell, and Smith, visitors will also see images of artists Phillip Glass, Cindy Sherman, and Elizabeth Peyton. The show also finds Close examining the limits of photographic portraiture, employing other related media such as tapestries and photogravures in unconventional ways.
The exhibition continues through June 15. Read more about the exhibition and view additional images here.
James Turrell at Aspen’s Baldwin Gallery
If you are lucky enough to be in Aspen, check out Season 2 artist James Turrell’s Light Works 2002-2007 exhibition before it closes this Sunday at the Baldwin Gallery. Renowned for his complex explorations into perception, light, and space, Turrell is showing sixteen “hologram” installations. Placing the viewer in a realm of “pure experience,” each work is a one of a kind dichromate reflection hologram developed by the artist himself. By recording light waves on a handmade transparent emulsion applied to glass, the resulting images appear to have depth from almost any perspective.
Like many of his other works, the illusion of Holograms is realized only with the audience’s interaction. Turrell’s optical trickery persuades the viewer to forgo conscious analysis of the phenomenon and look more completely at the meditative act of transformation.
For gallery hours and further information, please visit the Baldwin Gallery website.
Baldwin Gallery
209 South Galena Street
Aspen, CO 81611
James Turrell talk tonight at Mississippi State University
A rare chance to listen to Season 1 artist James Turrell speak about his work. If you live in the area, this event is not to be missed!
[via Crap Detector]
New installation by James Turrell at Albright-Knox Art Gallery
My work is about your seeing. There is a rich tradition in painting of work about light, but it is not light - it is the record of seeing. My material is light, and it is responsive to your seeing. — James Turrell
Season 1 artist James Turrell currently has a light installation on view at Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY through the end of the year. The work is entitled Gap, from the “Tiny Town series,” which he created between 2001-2006. The museum acquired the piece in 2005.
Turrell appeared on the art scene in the mid-1960s as part of the California light and space movement - an off-shoot of minimalism that took the literal and experimental nature of this New York movement in a different direction by focusing on visual perception itself.
In his work, Turrell isolates a central component of everyday experience—light. His installations grow out of a radically simple goal—to let the viewer experience light as directly as possible. In indoor installations such as Gap, he lets light take on its own otherworldly quality, creating a contemplative space where one experiences a single plane of illuminated color.
As viewers are forced to pay close attention to their own perceptions, their sense of reality is challenged, and the resulting instability generates a daydream experience.
Watch clips from James Turrell’s Art:21 segment and read extended interviews from the PBS series on his webpage here: http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/turrell/index.html
Roden Crater from the outside-in
The unknown opening date of Roden Crater, the lifelong art project of Season 1 artist James Turrell, has inspired a few intrepid devotees to make some clandestine pilgimages of their own.
[via New York Times]
